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Buffy the Vampire Slayer 5.18 | Intervention

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No matter how magic-corrupted she'd get we all know in-universe Willow would 100% opt for 'it should hit me and I'd fix all the problems if it did' *Morgan Freeman voiceover* "Willow getting hit by a bullet in the heart did not, in fact, solve any problems." At the most negative Willow-bashing interpretation under the view that she'd survive it and Tara would be grateful, in the line with the canons in a very self-sacrificing thing to ensure neither Buffy nor Tara were hurt again.

I was thinking of asking, "You save Tara but the bullet must hit one of the others instead; Who do you choose for it to hit?" And then it immediately occurred to me, "No one better say it bounces off the side of the house and hits Warren..." 🤣

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One Buffy storyline that would actually legitimately more or less write itself:

And the one comics season that with anything halfway human would also be the most obvious follow-through of the early seasons and Angel literally sending 16 million people to Hell because he did a fucky-wucky? The Safe Zone fascist USA storyline in Season 11. Consider everything we see in real life, based on primarily invented things, and then consider that in the Buffyverse the empowering of the Slayers, the disappearance of L.A., and the confirmation of both magic existing and just how powerful the most powerful sorcerers actually are would be a thing.

Consider also that the exposure of programs like the Initiative or that invisible assassin group would have proven the government knew of all too real monsters in the shadows, kept them secret, and didn't care if they ate people or not, so long as the government could make its own use from it. It would be the most obvious low hanging demagogic fruit for someone like "Malloy" (who has neither first name nor political party, nor state, but I give him the full name Nehemiah Scudder Malloy and have him as a mixture of Nehemiah Scudder and Jake Featherston, personality-wise) to exploit.

"One fine day the USA went to sleep the day before the election and woke up the day after it as the Imperium of Man waging war against the mutant, the alien, the heretic." And like the Imperium quietly hiding in the war yet another weaponization of the very thing officially decried, making monstrous cybernetic experiments and promoting the rise to power of a narrow few via deception and treachery.

While the setting left elements rather vague and generic, this is essentially how I treat Season 11 across universes, the circumstances of breaking the 'decline of magic' with a sledgehammer and confirming human-eating monsters are very real and were covered up for government advantage is the direct spark of an Imperium-style fascist state directed at non-human monsters that eat people, on the surface, and moving very rapidly to everyone else, too.

And the consequences of it are major civil unrest at minimum or a full-scale Second Civil War breaking out and producing major crises across the United States for the duration. Not least because while say, Willow Rosenberg might go to the camp for her own reasons, other powerful sorcerers or covens of same wouldn't and the most powerful demon lords certainly would have very good reasons to fight back, not to accept things, and the combination of that and the extension of repression spirals into massive riots or a Syria-style insurgency civil war.

Or, in the Witches and Slayers timeline, into a full-scale war that included major conventional fighting and degenerated into a protracted insurgency after the Malloy regime loses power to the one it stole that power from in a march on Washington.

I understand full well why the comics didn't do this, but given the scenario we see in Season 11 it is a very logical result of what we see and how we see it.

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I mean technically we don't see the Master actually hunting prey, people have to literally bring him the vampire equivalents of a doggy bag.....

Ok because that scene where spike tries (and fails) to bite willow in "the initiative" is on my dash today:

Willow asks him "doesnt this happen to every vampire?" And spike responds "not to me it doesnt", implying that losing the ability to bite people is a known occurrence in vampires of a certain age (since spike cites his relative youth as a reason why this couldnt be happening; "I'm only 126")? Obviously this is a comedy bit but like, the vampire equivalent of erectile dysfunction is real???

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One arc that by definition would not work anything like it did in current canon if Willow was the Slayer (and had magic)

Is the entire Simone Doffler arc. I do think that Willow the Slayer-Witch works a bit better than having Willow simply be a Slayer, as her arc as a supporting character is about power and its limits and knowing how to manage them well. If Willow was the first Slayer in the group called and gained the magic on top of Slaying she'd have that arc front and center in a way it wouldn't quite be with Buffy.

Willow is much more of a classic superhero than Buffy herself even when Buffy's the title character of a Blade-style superhero vs. monster of the week show. Slayer Willow, like my Witches and Slayers version, emphasizes this all the more though unlike the Witches and Slayers version if you have enough budget and enough gun you CAN shoot her, but then you'd best hope the killing her part works.

You can ask this AU's Mr. Trick how it works if it doesn't.

But if Willow called the Slayers to best the First, in this case, she would not tolerate the likes of Genevieve or Simone having the power she gave them and could give them a very straightforward punishment that'd show why she'd be both herself and very different to Buffy.

Essentially "I gave you this power, and made you a Slayer, and it made you worse than nothing, a worthless waste." (Basically give her that dialogue with canon Faith against a character like her who took it much further than she did).

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I do have two other takes on a Season 6 AU I intend to write:

Both of which are much, much shorter than my 'Oz dies instead of Tara' and 'Slayer Willow' AUs.

The first is the idea I've mentioned before of essentially my take on a more or less canon Season 6 playing much further into the Dark Phoenix analogue and what that would be like. The biggest distinctions would be that there's no use of a memory spell because of the Dawn Summers problem (namely that if Dawn Summers existing and being loved and protected by everyone is good, she is wholesale what Willow did retail) and Tara leaves Willow because of both the growth of Willow's powers on the one hand, and because that same growth gives her massive flashbacks to her family on the other.

And the irony is that Tara leaving essentially pushes Willow over that limit where she gains, essentially Dark Willow-tier power long before she snaps with it, much like Dark Phoenix was just Jean Grey without inhibitions, initially. Willow becomes the superheroic protector of Sunnydale while Xander and Anya are spiraling into their eventual breakup, while Buffy's spiraling into her mutually violent addiction of her very own with Spike, and Tara spends a good part of the season building up her own friend group again and eventually having the 'KEVIN!' moment when she realizes a few details everyone else missed about that resurrection spell and one of the most obvious reasons for Willow bringing Buffy back.

And in my case it's a blend of both Willow's sheer unhinged love for her best friend and ultimately that she was, essentially, the 'main character' instead of the Side Man, desperately wanted to avoid that, and then resurrected hedonist Buffy and her quest to be a normal girl with her hot immortal boyfriend who can't go in the daylight keeps her stuck there in what's a much more direct karmic comeuppance for resurrecting Buffy against her will in the first place.

The big switch happens, ultimately, as a product of Normal Again, and while all this is going on with the rest of the Scoobies, Willow's season is facing Amy and Warren (with his two little helpers) as two shadow selves of her in classical superhero-supervillain logic. Amy is the Baron Mordo to Willow's Doctor Strange, Warren is her computer and science-obsessed past without any emotional or moral restraints. But since both aspired to be the big bad and never really were, it's Warren shooting Buffy by sheer dumb accident in a botched attempt to kill Willow that sees her snap and go full Dark Phoenix....and thus

Willow essentially does a WandaVision, which fits in with the general 'yesterday's comedy is today's cosmic horror' vibe of Season 6 from canon, it shows why trying to fight her is worse than useless as you can't outpunch remaking reality on a whim, and she does all this by essentially tapping directly into the Seed of Wonder for an infinite power source as a foreshadowing of her own future destiny.

And thus the tragic element. Willow's demonstration of absolute power and turn as the Big Bad, in a very direct mirror to Jasmine on Angel, is a perfect world for everyone, *even* Spike, who gets essentially a recreated Gem of Amara and the chance to live his own life on his own terms. Buffy gets an idyllic peaceful Sunnydale where she's free to actually be Buffy Summers (and if this had happened halfway in the season she'd accept it, here she shows she *meant* the rejection of it from Normal Again). Xander and Anya both have elements of a partial perfect world that isn't entirely so because they don't have each other.

And it's Tara who plays, essentially, the Agatha Harkness and Vision roles in a combination, of sorts, as the person for whom so much of this is ultimately about but also the person with the power to destroy it and the ultimate willingness to do so. And thus they would ultimately end up talking things out with Willow and convincing her to back down because they can't out-punch this and the reality of 'real life as the bad guy' turning into 'the actual problem was we finally were living a real for true superhero story and misjudged the genre'.

The last three or four chapters would be set post-series and showcase where these characters would go in that much more distant sense.

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The second scenario is my take on Willow/Faith as a main ship and still closer to canon than the other, in that after bringing Buffy back Willow goes to quietly finish up as much of the spell as she can, learns the hard way that she should not call up what she was unwilling to put down, and essentially bargains with her own life to save both Buffy and Tara.

But she also in Season 6 Willow fashion learns a great deal of the wrong lessons, too, opting to judge the magic itself as the problem rather than her addictive pattern of behavior and her controlling behavior over the lives of others, which doesn't need magic to be a very bad thing that can go to very scary places. So what does she do? Wipes Faith's slate clean, brings her in, and she and Tara both break up in the end anyway because Tara's frightened of Willow's growth and deeply and profoundly misread the situation because in the end she never really did trust Willow, still, things got into a petty fight, and instead of a memory spell the two just break up.

Enter Faith, who has to deal with active loathing and outright hostility from Buffy, and everyone in the Scooby gang except Willow and initially Tara, who gets into a really tangled mess with Willow where their respective bad traits at this point in time create a perpetual feedback loop where instead of magic Willow spirals into a kind of masochistic element that is very directly paralleled to Buffy and Spike, while Faith just rolls with it, sees it as getting laid, and belatedly finds herself catching feelings.

Willow eventually has her lowest point, realizes she fucked up with both herself and Faith, and helps the two put things together again and gets herself and Faith both into a more emotionally healthy situation, and Willow's death will be a coin toss as this story would evolve in actually writing it between either the end of relationship breakup sex in what would actually be a fairly amiable breakup, or very like with canon she's with Tara and the two are actually just back together when Tara's in a shower, there's this sudden banging sound and the shattering of broken glass and either way, Tara finds herself in that bedroom with Willow dead on the floor and all bets are off.

And essentially unlike with canon Willow there's no destroy the world moment, there's the abuse survivor who lost one woman she loved and couldn't save who refuses to accept that twice, and now *Willow* is the one who's resurrected against her will after offering herself to save the world, which would see this story's second half in the Season 7 analogue, which has completely different dynamics. Resurrected Willow has her end-season power and understanding of it, Faith and Tara are in a triangle with her to an extent while she's struggling with her own reality of being resurrected and with what she learned on that other side.

Ironically Willow and Buffy are so close in this AU that the entire equivalent of the mutiny sees Willow sent on a snipe hunt because Willow is seen as Buffy's right hand and would have shut the effort down, because the one thing that the two now share is very much the same basic trauma and difficulties in coping with it. And here the newly ensouled Spike actually gets to earn some of his redemption and narrative hijacking as his own elements of recovering from everything the soulless monster did and that the chipped monster was intertwines with both Willow and Buffy reclaiming full control of their own lives.

And the ultimate narrative here for Tara and Willow would be their getting back together and healing the wounds from the AU Season 6, with Faith and her own life set in order by virtue of her feeling confident enough in herself *not* to go out deliberately seeking partners to fill that particular void and having the usual role I give any AU's Tara of being the most emotionally mature and wise person in the room, with her POV contrasted to people *precisely* from switching by virtue of 'first they make each other worse, then better, then shit gets weird but she still stays better'.

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Male writers writing female characters:

“Cassandra woke up to the rays of the sun streaming through the slats on her blinds, cascading over her naked chest. She stretched, her breasts lifting with her arms as she greeted the sun. She rolled out of bed and put on a shirt, her nipples prominently showing through the thin fabric. She breasted boobily to the stairs, and titted downwards.”

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I actually favor the idea of Faith being called in in Season 6 in the midst of the entire maelstrom with Willow being the one to do it.....because it's a standard Season 6 Willow act of arrogance thinking she's in perfect control of a volatile situation and hey, she's single now so she's going to ignore Amy, master the magic and herself, and everything'll turn up Rosenberg only for Faith to basically make both of them worse as their dynamic turns into precisely that.

And as a bonus twist it's *not* the magic addiction kind of worst, it's that she replaces one set of addictive self-destructive behavior with another, because she didn't resolve the deeper problem, only one part of it. And for Faith, it sublimates all of her major self-loathing and guilt issues with someone only too happy to basically indulge in some really self-destructive elements there.

Meanwhile Tara's at first as blind-sided as everyone else, starts getting *really* pissy and resentful that Faith just merrily barges into things, and that Willow evidently seemed to have no problem giving up magic after all which digs a deeper hole between them in the short term.....right up until that one day between Spike crossing one line and Warren's bullet hitting a Willow who overslept due to having a little too good a night with either Tara (for one kind of knife twist) or Faith as their swansong of everything because she's finally willing to put herself together fully and properly only to get a bullet in the heart.

Which would be when things go from bad to catastrophic for everyone involved, with Tara essentially going Pet Sematary and actually having a legitimate axe to grind with Faith, on the one hand, Buffy blaming Faith for everything when Willow was 100% of the issue, too, and the standard Whedon knife-twist that Willow eventually does figure out the deeper problems, takes efforts to fix it, helps convince Faith to do so, and right when Faith thinks they've actually managed to turn this particular corner everything blows up in everyone's face.

The Season 7 and after approach with Faith and Willow is essentially going to duplicate some elements of Willow and Kennedy and Faith would deserve better than to be the rebound girl. Kennedy was essentially Season 3 Faith with money as it was.

what are your thoughts on faith x willow?

Well, I obviously don't really see it as I didn't include it on my buffy verse ship breakdown. But since you point it out to me I don't think quite has the narrative value or inherit chemistry of something like Fluffy but I do think the fact that they both have such a focus on redemption post buffy season 6 they could defiantly do something interesting. I think that Faith and Willow have very different views on redemption and different views on relationships. Maybe they could balance each other out but I do think they would crash out. 5/10

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There's several what if Willow were killed instead of Tara fics out there, and I've seen you mention the idea. I feel like no one touches on the fact that killing Willow in that moment likely results in the world's angriest ghost/poltergeist

I mean yes, though Alyson Hannigan's IRL contracts would not mean any death scene would be lasting, which offers plenty of room to explore specific kinds of story fodder. As I've mentioned before Tara's dialogue around both death and resurrection offers more than a few hints she took at least a few steps down the Pet Sematary path before and I can see her, much later and with the power to actually do it, refusing to allow Willow to die while creating a kind of dual-sided bookend for both Season 6, with the season ending as it begins with a resurrection as the capstone scene, and with Season 5 where one of these two goes to great and terrible lengths to restore another who was lost to circumstances beyond their control.

I think it could also work like that and as a kind of Pyrrhic victory by a secondary bookend that now it's Willow's turn to do the noble self-sacrifice thing to atone for her great mistake in dabbling with all of this and when it's undone this part of group dynamics gets reset hard to zero........which also has the merit of essentially making her relationship with Buffy a blank slate as the two would just *get* it in a way nobody else really could.

Angry Ghost Willow basically doing the 'Tara, I realize how hypocritical this is but don't you fucking dare' routine while Tara's ignoring her and reacting as if it's basically the First when in a grand irony it's actually *Willow* all along would add a gallows humor kind of comedy to that.

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You like to point out the similarities of the Buffyverse to comics, specifically the Dark Phoenix. Have you ever thought about how Dark WIllow's end at the end of Grave is pretty much the way Malice turns back into Sue Richards, though Xander uses confessions of love, rather than mockery like Reed.

Yes, which is one of Xander's best moments in the show.

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It's a very easy scenario to jump-start the Dark Willow arc and force Willow's character growth in some areas even as it'd lag in others. The Initiative also can 100% with great ease, as it showed with Oz, adapt to Friends of Humanity style persecution of superpowered humans, not just the 'eat all humans' demons. Willow escaping because they essentially force her to start channeling enough magic she essentially starts tapping into the power source in the Hellmouth and goes full Dark Phoenix and accidentally starts the Adam arc by getting him woken up to in the mess?

Makes an otherwise forgettable season much more fun, does what it kind of did on a softer scale anyway and does the meaningful parts of Season 6 minus the suckier bits, and on with a broader narrative. Could even have Tara brought in as a kind of person in theory meant to help them because 1) witch, 2) doesn't know Willow, 3) hilarity ensues for everyone except Oz, if he's still around and it makes New Moon Rising whiplash back to gallows humor comedy if he isn't and he comes back to *that* mess.

My favourite and longest running au I have for Buffy or probably my Initiative au. What's it about? Well basically, in The Initiative as one of the camo guys picks Willow up to get her to quarantine she does a spell in panic, a mildly offensive one but on the offense either way. This obviously makes them go, Oh Demon, Oh Whatever They Call Supernaturals (sub t????), and means they HAVE to bring her in. And then she just spends the next weeks getting experimented on and dehumanised and such before she somehow breaks herself out and accidentally (?) kills some people in the process.

Fun times all around. For me.

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TBH Something Blue is the real point where Dark Willow in some form became the 'when and how bad is it going to get' question. Willow's habit of magic first instead of coping like a normal person was fully consolidated and vindicated and she had the best reasons in the world never to trust her friends with actual emotional difficulties that mattered when a magic spell was better. Add to it her role in performing that powerful magic to repeatedly save the world, and Tara or no Tara, Oz or no Oz, she was going to go Dark Phoenix in some kind of way.

I honestly think that had Buffy given Willow a fraction of the same one-sided devotion Willow gave her with Angel that the specific track we saw in canon would not have happened quite as it did, as Willow would have believed she *could* go to her friends first on important things, and that wasn't the arc that the show or the universe in this case wanted to take.

So we're judging Willow for having a beer at the bronze. A beer she was hiding.

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If we had this in Season 6 it could 100% be a law of unintended consequences thing where Faith shows up in Season 6 and manages to make everyone and everything worse, while Tara gets at least partially blindsided given that one Season 5 argument indicated she wasn't entirely sure Willow really was gay and would probably not like very much that Willow replaced one addiction with another.

I can also see Faith, as it's Faith we're talking about here, throwing it in Tara's face just to be a bitch because she can, because she's reformed, at least to a point, not tamed, and she'd 100% be crass enough with it to play the dangerous game of goading Tara for the LULZ.

rosenhane spuffy parallels wouldve been a beautiful addition to the show. willow views her quiet relationship with faith like punishment but also a way to escape the insane reality she’s living much like buffy with spike. as buffy and willow drift apart they end up realizing one thing connects them and it’s this similarity. “why didnt you tell me?” from buffy and “i didn’t know what you guys- especially you- would think” from willow and they both hug as buffy makes some joke about how nobody can be on her case about sleeping with spike.

i can also see faith taking this out on buffy when willow tries to end things and then spike stepping in to defend buffy.

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I mean yes and no, the tension was already there in Season 5 and Willow ignored everything Tara said to save Tara from what she explicitly mentioned as her worst nightmare, which was when Tara encountered a very predictable obstacle in trying to do 'Willow no!' in that if Willow *had* listened she'd either still be deranged or dead.

What reinforces the addiction elements is precisely that reality, at least as Willow would have elected to see it, went out of the way to reward actions that were ultimately dangerous and self-destructive and gave very little reason for restraint until it blew up in her faces and everyone else's.

Tara and Giles were not written nearly as well as they should have been to raise points, which is one of the areas where Season 6 took a great many long-established plotlines and contrived ways to fumble the execution of every single one of them.

i genuinely believe spike was right about willow knowing buffy could come back wrong. she was confident but not stupid.

this is the start of her true addiction- learning she is able to perform such strong and powerful spells. this is also when we see tension between her and tara form.

season six is filled with heavy material but addiction was a focus from the start

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To be perfectly crude the writers never thought about it one way or the other and the ability of Season 7 Buffy to support all those Potentials on a Guidance Counselor's salary is the only proof people need.

The worst kind of BtVS discourse is about how Willow and Tara didn't pay rent, or anything along the lines of how the gang could have handled Buffy's financial situation better in season 6.

The only way to approach this question is from a Doylist perspective, you cannot blame Willow or Tara or Giles or anyone for the money problem because the POINT of season 6 is for Buffy to struggle with real-life, adult challenges. I.e. getting a job and paying bills. Willow, Tara, Giles... none of them were EVER going to solve Buffy's money problems for good because that's not the story the writers wanted to tell.

You have to understand BtVS as a narrative first and foremost, not as a collection of individuals you are tasked with passing judgment on. That's not the point of storytelling.

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TBH given we know Tara said she was rebellious at one point, I think her hard line here and her evasiveness is because the truth behind that 'rebelliousness' was not 'staying out and going to parties', it was a Pet Sematary moment because the alternative was being alone as the punching bag for her daddy and her brother and she'd see reality in Hell first. It would also explain why she both understood elements of Willow's spell and was ultimately willing to go along with it in spite of that hard line.

It's a 'between the lines' reading but one with a fair degree of subtext to support it.

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (1997-2003) “Forever”

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I mean at the end of the day the elephant in the room nobody else brings up (it makes perfect sense that Willow herself wouldn't, but what stopped the rest of them) is that "I am the oldest living Slayer, obey me" has a pretty glaring missed point in that.

The sole, only reason she's physically talking about it is that Willow literally brought her back from the dead against her wishes, which was the entire running plotline of the entire last season. Since neither Xander nor Anya were pulling punches, their not making that particular impolite observation is a pretty interesting 'writers forgot their own story' note, really.

The people who say that Buffy's only true friends were Tara and Cordy and that all of her other friends were terrible and didn't appreciate her always tend to only ever use one scene as their justification: when they kick her out in S7E19 Empty Places.

The thing they seem to forget is the people whispering in their ears all season:

Dawn gets manipulated by The First in the form of Joyce pretty early on and while she's told it's the first, she can't shake the warning her "mother" gave her and distrusts Buffy for the rest of the season

Willow spends a lot of time with K*nnedy, who is shown from the start to hate Buffy. It's not unreasonable to assume that K*nnedy would say things to Willow that slowly chip away at Willow's faith in Buffy, especially when X*nder gets actually hurt for the first time

Giles should've died instead of moving back to England because that's when his writing stopped making sense and I stand by that. But pretend for a second that he's the same guy he's always been. Giles is resentful at not being needed anymore – despite him leaving so Buffy wouldn't need him anymore – and jumps right in when he realises without Buffy, he could be in charge again

Anya, the writers didn't know what to do with when she was no longer attached to x*nder and so made writing choices that didn't really make sense for her, including teaming up to kick Buffy out of her own house

Faith was manipulated by The First in the form of the mayor, the only parental figure we ever see her have. She is a vulnerable person who never actually got along with Buffy and is super susceptible to basic manipulation tactics

X*nder acting that way was actually super in character. He's done shit like that to Buffy a bunch before: when he didn't tell her Willow was working on the curse for Angel again, when he gave her that whole speech about going and getting r*ley, when Anya had killed a whole fraternity and Buffy needed to do her job by killing Anya, etc.

At the end of the day, the only people to not consistently have Buffy's back aside from that scene are x*nder and Faith. Make a new point if you want me to believe you so bad